February 23, 2012
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HomeShow Radio | Tom Tynan | Home Improvement Answers
Home remodeling, renovation, and repair tips with Tom Tynan
Trees can get very thirsty. A mature oak tree can soak up to 50 gallons of water per day. When the trees around your home soak up all that water from the soil, it's bad news for your foundation.
A foundation raises and lowers depending on the soil it sits on. When trees dry up the soil, your foundation settles. Settlement is not a good thing. How do you keep your foundation safe without uprooting your trees?
Kenny Dutton from Du-West Foundation Repair shows you how to shield your home from moisture-sapping roots.
It takes a lot of water to keep your trees green. A mature oak can drink up to 50 gallons of water per day. That leaves your soil high and dry, which is bad news for your foundation.
As a tree grows, and the more mature a tree gets, the more moisture the tree needs to survive. The moisture typically for the tree is going to come out of the soil. If the soils dry out under a foundation in an area where we have expansive soils, the clay can shrink, go downward, allowing the house to go downward. And the idea behind putting a root barrier in is to keep the tree from stealing the moisture out, or robbing the moisture from underneath the foundation.
Well generally, when we're going to put in a root barrier, an estimator would have come out to a home, looked at a home, made a determination if a root barrier is proper for the home or not. We're going to dig a trench and sever the roots between the tree and the house.
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And in that trench-- and it'll be about 36 inches deep-- we'll place a polyethylene barrier. It'll keep the tree roots from growing back through towards the house and keep that tree from taking moisture out from underneath the foundation of a home.
The root shield works well for most trees, but some timber is untouchable.
Typically, we don't want to put a root barrier on a home where the tree is older than the house. And the reason is, that soil in the area where the home was built was accustomed to that tree drawing moisture out. And if we put a barrier in there and remove the roots, the soils will accumulate moisture and swell higher than they were when the home was built.
Usually, you're not going to have a lot of effect from a tree on the foundation, but keeping it pruned well is about the best preventative maintenance you can do on an older tree.
Keep your trees drinking and keep your home from sinking with root shield protection for your foundation.
For HomeShowRadio.com, I'm Tom Tynan.
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